Smart Barrier Box for Monitoring and State Conditions Evaluation of Rockfall Barrier Systems

Abstract

Under the responsibility of the Slovenian Infrastructure Agency, a new project in establishing a system for comprehensive protection of state roads against rockfalls started three years ago. In 19 years, around 5.000 m of flexible barriers on 85 locations around Slovenia were installed, and 5.950 m in four years (including 2019). Much more will be constructed in the next 10 years. That is why many activities are dedicated also to the area of establishing the regular maintenance of all measures, related to rockfall protection. The experience shows that rockfall and debris barriers demonstrate that they are often difficult of access when installed in mountainous areas. Furthermore, these barriers can also be installed close to roads or close to coastal areas where the salt entry to these systems is not negligible for the corrosion process of the complete steel construction. Therefore, DRI and an industrial partner started to cooperate together in order to test a new developed digital device – called smart barrier box (with accelerometers and corrosion sensors) which sends a signal to the customer in a rockfall or landslide event as a warning system. Besides weather data, corrosion data with a special developed corrosion sensor is also included in this kind of system. The corrosion process can be monitored with this device in real state condition of the local microclimate. This paper will present data of our measurements at five locations in Slovenia that are representative of the most aggressive conditions in terms of density of rockfall events and climatic conditions. Emphasis will be put into automatic data process and display, supporting an attempt to define state conditions of the case studies, as the first step of predictive maintenance. It must be stressed that maintenance concepts for such barriers hardly exist so far. We believe that the installation of these smart systems will provide a database that allow in the future to get knowledge about life time and maintenance work period costs for their barriers without regular man power checking the flexible barriers.